E. Clinton Bamberger, Lawyer With a ‘Fire for Justice,’ Is Dead at 90

E. Clinton Bamberger, a Maryland defense lawyer and legal aid advocate whose court challenge spared a convicted murderer from the death penalty and led to a precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling in 1963 that protected criminal defendants, died on Sunday in Baltimore. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by the Francis King Carey School of Law at the University of Maryland, where he was a professor emeritus.

Mr. Bamberger was fueled by what a colleague called a “fire for justice” in pursuing the case of John L. Brady to the United States Supreme Court. He asked the court to overturn Mr. Brady’s murder conviction and sentence after it was discovered that an accomplice’s confession had been withheld from the defense.

As a result of the court’s ruling, prosecutors everywhere were required to reveal suppressed evidence that might favor criminal defendants. The decision became known as the Brady rule.

Mr. Bamberger would later modestly profess that he had actually lost the case for which he was most famous because the Supreme Court rejected his plea for a new trial. Nonetheless, the ruling broadly expanded defendants’ rights.

Mr. Bamberger spent a lifetime championing free counsel for poor people. He lobbied fellow lawyers through bar groups and, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, was the first director of the federal Legal Services Program of the Office of Economic Opportunity, part of the administration’s war on poverty.

He had been introduced to Mr. Brady by a former professor, a Jesuit priest who Mr. Bamberger — compassionate but cleareyed — said had “never met a guilty man.”

Mr. Brady and his girlfriend’s brother, Charles D. Boblit, had been arrested in the 1958 murder of William Brooks, who had been strangled. The police said the two had been trying to steal Mr. Brooks’s car to rob a bank.

Under questioning, the two men pointed at each other: Mr. Brady identified Mr. Boblit as the killer, while Mr. Boblit said it was Mr. Brady. They were convicted in separate trials and sentenced to death.

In preparing Mr. Brady’s appeal, Mr. Bamberger noticed that while Mr. Boblit had made five statements to the police, only four had been given to the defense. The fifth had not been admitted as evidence because it had not been signed by Mr. Boblit.

When Mr. Bamberger got hold of it, he discovered that it held a confession: Mr. Boblit said that he, not Mr. Brady, had twisted his shirt sleeve into a garrote and strangled Mr. Brooks. “It was his idea to strangle him,” Mr. Boblit, who remains imprisoned, said. “I wanted to shoot him.”

An appeals court granted Mr. Brady a new sentencing hearing but not a new trial. The Supreme Court concurred.

“They did not reverse the court,” Mr. Bamberger said, “but in the course of writing the opinion, they wrote the Brady rule.”

In a 7-to-2 majority opinion, Justice William O. Douglas wrote that failure to provide defendants with favorable evidence when it existed violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. He compared that failure to the conscious use of perjured testimony.

Mr. Bamberger, in an interview with the National Equal Justice Library in 2002, said of the ruling: “What it stands for is that the state is obligated to make available to the defendant evidence even that is exculpatory of the defendant. When I say to public defenders that I argued the Brady rule, they genuflect.”

Mr. Brady was paroled after 18 years, married and became a truck driver. “I think that the only crime he ever committed was robbing this guy,” Mr. Bamberger said. “I don’t know who killed the man, and I don’t think either of them know.”

Edward Clinton Bamberger Jr. was born on July 2, 1926, in Baltimore, the son of Edward Clinton Bamberger Sr. and the former Ann Russo. He earned a bachelor of science degree from Loyola College in Baltimore (now Loyola University Maryland) and graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center.

His wife, the former Katharine Kelehar, died in December. He is survived by their son, Edward C. Bamberger III, known as Ned, and three grandchildren. A daughter, Christine Ann Bamberger, died in 1998.

After serving in the Johnson administration, Mr. Bamberger was recruited by a former Georgetown classmate, the Rev. Robert Drinan, to be dean of the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America in Washington. (Father Drinan, who became a congressman from Massachusetts, was on the search committee.)

Mr. Bamberger became executive vice president of the Legal Services Corporation, a congressionally chartered successor to the program he had headed earlier, and then joined the law school faculty at the University of Maryland.

Throughout his career, Mr. Bamberger encouraged lawyers to offer free counsel to clients who could not afford standard fees.

In 1966, in the Notre Dame Law Review, he wrote that the Johnson legal-services program was “national recognition that the poor are least equipped with the resources and resilience to obtain fair treatment and, accordingly, least able to cope with the landlord, the merchant, the welfare official, the policeman — people you and I handle with relative ease in the unlikely event we ever see them.”

Writing about Mr. Bamberger in an email, Prof. Michael Millemann of the Carey School recalled that as a young legal aid lawyer in 1969, “what I valued the most was Clint’s commitment to our independence — our right to represent the poor in the same way big private law firms represented the rich.”

“His legacy? His fire for justice,” he added, “and his demonstration of the ways in which you can and must combine idealism and pragmatism to achieve it.”

At his own law firm, Piper & Marbury in Baltimore, Mr. Bamberger helped establish the Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship to subsidize young lawyers who wanted to work in legal aid programs. In an interview, he explained how the fellowships got their name.

“Reginald Heber Smith was a Boston Brahmin lawyer who wrote a study of legal aid in 1920 that is a landmark work that refuted the claims of some bar leaders that poor people had plenty of legal services,” Mr. Bamberger said. “And we thought if we named them Reginald Heber Smith — a nice Brahmin name — nobody would ever think that they were subversive infiltrators.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: E. Clinton Bamberger, Defense Lawyer With a ‘Fire for Justice,’ Is Dead at 90. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe